Alejandro Mosso: On the Slight Unfamiliarity and Finding Beauty in Sound
Alejandro
Mosso
A return conversation with the Berlin-based composer and producer we've been following and listening to for years — on control, surrender, and the architecture of sound.
Art, Chaos & the World Right Now — In your 2024 interview with 15 Questions, you mentioned Man's Rage for Chaos, which feels especially relevant today. How do you see art helping us process or even adapt to today's societal instability? And on a personal level, how does that idea shape the way you create?
The book Man's Rage for Chaos is actually not about society or chaos, it's about art. Peckham argues that art trains us for unexpected or novel situations, and in doing so serves an evolutionary function. The idea is that art doesn't present order. It presents perceptual fields that are slightly off, slightly unexpected, and through that exposure we rehearse our most important evolutionary mechanism: adaptation.
That reframing completely changed how I think about what art does. Not cultural decoration, not emotional expression in the conventional sense, but something closer to a biological necessity. And the fact that he wrote this in 1965, well before current research in evolutionary aesthetics and neuroaesthetics, makes it even more striking.
On a personal level it has freed me from thinking about order as a goal. Instead I think about the aesthetic experience, about constructing something made with intention, but that doesn't fully follow your perceptual expectations. Something that places you in an only slightly unfamiliar position and asks you to recalibrate.
"Art doesn't present order. It presents perceptual fields that are slightly off, slightly unexpected, and through that exposure we rehearse our most important evolutionary mechanism: adaptation."
Technology vs. Return to Basics — There's a growing backlash against technology, with more people craving simplicity. Do you feel that tension in your own work? Or do you see yourself as an artist who leans into evolving tools?
I think the backlash against technology has always been there, across every major shift throughout history. It's a recurring tension in society, and by extension in art.
On a personal level I feel it constantly. It's a daily negotiation between what new tools make possible and what my actual goals and interests are. I think it comes down to balance, like most important things in life. Adopting new tools simply because they exist isn't the way forward, but neither is rejecting them by default. What's important is understanding what a tool actually does, what place it has in your practice (if any), and whether it helps you focus on what matters. Which is ultimately the hardest question to answer: what actually matters to you?
Rather than a romanticised idea of returning to basics, I think it's more useful to ask whether you are remaining focused on what genuinely makes you happy. Because sometimes technology is exactly what helps you do that.
Evolution of Your Sound — We last connected around 2007/08. What feels fundamentally different in how you approach making music today?
Almost two decades. A lot has changed, though strangely some things haven't.
The biggest shift has been technical. Over the years I've accumulated a lot of knowledge about how to translate what's in my head — a sound, a melody, an aesthetic — into something material. But that same technical fluency has at times worked against me, narrowing my expressive range rather than expanding it. When you know exactly how to do something, you tend to do it that way.
Recently I've been thinking a lot about the balance between control and surrender — knowing when to apply what you know and when to step back and let something unexpected happen. It's a constant negotiation, and I'm not sure it ever resolves. But that tension is where the most interesting work tends to come from.
On the "control vs. surrender" tension — Can you give a concrete example of a moment where letting go produced something you couldn't have planned?
This feeling of surrender usually happens early in the compositional process. Sometimes I have a clear idea of what I want to write, sit down in the studio, turn on the machines, start playing around, and then suddenly something happens. A melody or a chord progression appears that is nothing like what I had in mind, but it hits you in a way that you can't ignore. Something in you wakes up and says: follow this.
I've tried resisting it, pushing through toward what I originally intended, but it rarely leads anywhere truly rewarding. Whereas when you catch that moment of inspiration and let everything else go, it tends to take you somewhere unexpected that you later realise was exactly where you needed to be.
That's what I mean by surrender. And it can be one of the most powerful experiences in making art.
"When you catch that moment of inspiration and let everything else go, it tends to take you somewhere unexpected that you later realise was exactly where you needed to be."
Direction — What are you working on right now, and what's coming next?
Right now I'm working on a few remixes for younger artists whose music I genuinely connect with. There's something unique about discovering a new generation contributing their own interpretations to an aesthetic line you've been part of for a long time. Like the story is continuing, and someone else is picking up the thread.
I've also started re-releasing music from my back catalogue. Over two decades I've put out around 50 EPs and 8 albums, and a lot of that music has disappeared as labels closed down or went quiet. I'm slowly trying to bring it all back together under one roof — a project I'm calling mosso archives.
In parallel I've been pushing forward OLA, an event series and collective focused exclusively on live electronic music performance.
A direct response to a scene that has confused DJ performance with music performance. OLA exists to give space to the musicians who actually wrote the music — to perform it live, be acknowledged, and get paid for it.
@olaworldlive on Instagram ↗A single-track album project with a strong conceptual basis — exploring the tension between control and surrender that runs through Mosso's entire practice.
alejandromosso.com/surrender ↗OLA — Is there a specific performance that proved to you what live electronic music can be? Who are some of the artists you've performed alongside?
Over the years I've seen hundreds of live electronic music performances across the full spectrum. Some particularly memorable ones: Pantha Du Prince, Raz Ohara, Henrik Schwarz, Matthew Johnson, Vladislav Delay, Murcof, Stimming.
I've been lucky enough to share a stage with some of them already. OLA though, is deliberately focused on smaller or less visible artists who are doing genuinely interesting work, haven't had many platforms to show it, and want to be part of the project.
Our scene has gradually become a sad spectacle where a DJ in a booth, waving their hands, is presented as a "music performance." Meanwhile the musicians who actually wrote that music, who spent years crafting it, rarely get acknowledged and almost never get booked to play that same music live and get paid for it. OLA exists as a direct response to that.
On the mosso archives — What does it feel like to revisit that old work? Are you tempted to re-edit, or do you prefer to leave it exactly as it was?
It's a strange and quite special feeling to listen back to releases from 20 years ago. The urge to correct things, improve the sound, fix decisions that now seem obvious, is definitely there. But I've left them mostly intact. They belong to that moment.
That said, I can still hear myself in those releases. There is a similar quest behind them, a similar intention, even if the execution has evolved considerably.
Life in Berlin — How does living in Berlin shape your perspective and your sound? What does the city give you creatively that nowhere else could?
For decades Berlin has been extraordinarily fertile ground for artists working in electronic dance music, ambient, electronica, and sound art. From my point of view this came down to three things: time, space, and freedom. When people have those, they can allow themselves to wander, experiment, dream, fail, and restart.
The conditions that made this possible were twofold. On one hand, a strong and stable national economy that invested heavily in rebuilding its reunified capital. On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly in the early years, the post-reunification collapse left vast areas of East Berlin effectively empty — abandoned buildings, cheap rents, entire neighbourhoods without a clear function. That vacuum is where the scene was born.
Unfortunately that island of freedom is rapidly disappearing. Gentrification, massive inflation, global instability, and shifting political priorities are all compressing the conditions that made Berlin what it was. The time, space, and freedom that once defined it are becoming increasingly scarce. It is still a remarkable city, but it is changing fast, and not always in ways that favour artists.
"Time, space, and freedom. When people have those, they can allow themselves to wander, experiment, dream, fail, and restart. That vacuum is where the scene was born."
Defining the Undefined — "Experimental dance music" and "club music" get used a lot. What do those terms actually mean to you? Isn't all music inherently experimental at its core?
I guess in a way all music is experimental, as most things in life are to some extent. In full honesty, although I use it occasionally, I'm always a bit wary of the term, especially in academic contexts where it tends to get treated as a fixed category.
The way I use it is simply to signal a certain freedom from structure and expectation, in composition or in performance. But complete absence of structure tips into random noise and nonsense, so the term can only stretch so far as a technical description.
I think "experimental" has more of a sociological meaning than a conceptual one. It describes a relationship to a particular cultural moment and place rather than a stable set of properties. What counts as experimental here and now might be entirely unremarkable somewhere else tomorrow.
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